I’ve put some thoughts together on what’s been happening since Operation Epic Fury kicked off on the 28th. The news is full of maps with red circles and “mission accomplished” vibes. The view from outside the briefing room is more complicated, and more concerning.

The military side is easy to summarize. In about 100 hours, the US and Israel dismantled Iran’s conventional military spine: air defenses, missile silos, confirmed kill on the Supreme Leader. If you’re working from a targeting spreadsheet, we’ve won 100%.

But we’re not reading a targeting spreadsheet. We’re reading a situation.

I’ve been calling what we’re watching the tacticization of strategy; the confusion of tactical success with strategic success. We can find targets and hit them. That is not the same as knowing how a war ends.

The grand strategy vacuum

The root of the problem predates this operation by three decades. The United States has had no grand strategy since roughly 1992. From 1947 until the Wall came down, American policy ran on a north star: Containment. Flawed, but coherent. It dictated commitments. Since the Soviet collapse, we’ve moved from crisis to crisis, driven not by national purpose but by the momentum of our own capabilities.

When the strategic frame is empty, the tactical frame fills the vacuum. Servicing targets becomes the mission. Clearing the screens of enemy icons becomes the definition of victory.

Harry Summers tells the story of a conversation with a North Vietnamese colonel in Hanoi after the war. Summers said: “You never beat us on the battlefield.” The colonel replied: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

The 32-headed problem

We may have hoped to repeat something like the Venezuela intervention. Iran doesn’t work that way.

The IRGC was built to absorb decapitation. Their doctrine, Mosaic Defense (Defāʼ-e Mozāʼiki), distributes the force into 32 semi-autonomous territorial commands, one per province plus a dedicated Tehran unit. They operate under fourth-successor protocols. Even with the head gone, these commands hold pre-delegated orders: bleed the region, hold ground, don’t wait for a signal from a capital that no longer functions.

Airstrikes don’t defeat a structure like that. Time and politics do, and we have given ourselves a short supply of both.

The Israeli divergence

We also have a fundamental mismatch with our partners. Israel operates on “Mowing the Grass,” periodic strikes to keep a threat manageable. For them, a fractured, chaotic Iran is a strategic win. It’s too busy collapsing to threaten the border.

For the United States, an unstable Iran is a different problem entirely. Oil is at $100 a barrel and climbing. What works for Israeli security is often a direct cost to American strategic stability.

Death ground

Walking away from the JCPOA stripped away the last diplomatic baseline. The Iranian regime is now on death ground: cornered, no exit offered. When you close the Golden Bridge, rational actors become nihilists.

That’s playing out at home. The IRGC has lost the ability to fight us conventionally, so it has turned the knife on its own population. The Crimson Winter protests in January cost upward of 36,000 civilian lives. The Digital Siege has crashed the currency to 1.5 million rial to the dollar. None of that is producing a popular revolution. The people are unarmed. The IRGC is not.

Beijing’s victory

The bitterest piece: our best-case scenario now depends on Beijing. If China pressures Iran toward a ceasefire, Washington will call it a victory. What it actually represents is China stepping in as the primary regional stabilizer. We broke the glass. The Chinese will own what gets built in its place.

The bottom line

We’ve dismantled the conventional spine of a nation-state. Without a strategy to guide the aftermath, we haven’t solved a problem; we’ve decentralized it.

The Iranians will still be there when the smoke clears, and they can absorb more pain than the American public is prepared for.

Iranian Quagmire?